


Ibid.

by trinityofone



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen, M/M, Perhaps an overabundance of winking nods to TOS, Post Star Trek: Into Darkness, vulcan makeouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 05:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Restless as he recovers from the events of the movie, Kirk is somewhat surprised to find himself starting a library.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ibid.

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to Siria and Tara1031 for help and encouragement! And to judgebunnie, who knows her aliens.

Uhura arrives with a book under her arm. A heavy old-fashioned hardcover, and his confusion must show, because Uhura’s face takes on a slightly wry cast. “This is from Spock,” she says. “He was worried—“ She checks herself, the wryness even more pronounced. “He expressed a concern that you might be bored.”

“I will be, after a few pages of this,” Jim says, pushing himself up in bed to take it from her—he’s hefted lighter bricks. “Dickens?” he says, examining the spine. “Wow. He knows me _so well_.” 

They share a smile and a shrug. Then abruptly Uhura darts forward. Slim, steady hands rest atop his shoulders; warm lips press against his forehead. Her earrings make a soft chiming sound as they move, tiny tinkling bells.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she says. Then she straightens, takes two neat steps back. Her voice is honey-smooth, warm. “Captain.” Affection and respect, the kind of thing you’d die for.

“Hey.” He clumsily catches at her sleeve. Lets his smile turn sloppy, young. “Wanna run a mission with me?”

The corner of Uhura’s mouth twitches up. “Does it involve dressing up as K’normian arms dealers?”

It involves sneaking out of his room and up onto the medical center’s roof. He’s shaky when he first gets to his feet, Uhura hovering by his side and looking half a second from ordering him back into bed, rank be damned. But the farther they get from that room, the more fully he feels his strength returning, a wild, rushing surge. Uhura’s hand skirts along his shoulders, then falls to her side as they step out of the turbolift. She watches him warily as he sets out across the stone path.

The roof is a garden, which he didn’t know; more important, it’s an open, airy space, which he guessed. It also offers a broad, panoramic view of the city and the bay, including the destruction of the waterfront, which Jim has heard about in abortive scraps, in spite of Bones’ best efforts. Jim approaches the annoying plexiglass barrier with strengthening strides and looks out, Uhura steady by his right shoulder. “Jim,” she says.

“It’s worse than I thought.”

She says nothing. What could she possibly say? He stares at the tented ruins of the crash site, the blinking lights and steady hum of the workers already busy with reconstruction, then turns, his gaze caught by the movement of a jumpship lifting off from the other part of the roof, seemingly picking Uhura’s hair up with it, fluttering it in tendrils around her fine, fierce face. In the garden, a young woman stops pushing a man in a wheelchair up the path and sits down on a bench beside him. 

“We have to do better than this,” he says, although he doesn’t mean her. “This has to change.”

For a long moment, she regards him. Then she reaches out and curls her long fingers around the crook of his arm. “Come on,” she says, leaning against him. “Walk with me.”

*

Later, once Uhura’s escorted Jim back to his room and coaxed Bones away in an attempt at placation that Jim gives only fifty/fifty odds, he curls up on his side with Spock’s gift—bestowed through an intermediary: _really_ , Spock? Jim’s going to make him so uncomfortable on his next birthday, he’s planning it already. He flips open the book’s cover—even the _cover_ is heavy—absently, thinking through the preliminaries of his plot, thinking deliberately about that and nothing else. He lets his eyes drift down the page. 

_It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…_

Jim snorts. Of course he knows this part already, the way anybody half-awake knows the most famous opening lines of their culture’s literature. _It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Call me Ishmael. The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived._

He keeps reading out of bemusement, for the most part, past the part everyone knows—the spring of hope and the winter of despair, the season of Light and the season of Darkness—and onto the adventures of a fumbling mail coach, rumbling down a rough road at night. There are a bunch of odd characters trading banter and a vague threat of highwaymen and Jim finds himself intrigued in spite of himself. Maybe he can tell Spock that of course he didn’t read it—and then at just the right moment bust out with an appropriate quote, a tendril of plot, revealed with a dazzling smile, a smug almost-wink.

When he wakes next, the book is wedged uncomfortably into his ribs, a corner of his sheet threaded into place two-thirds of the way through.

*

“That bastard’s blood isn’t actually going to make you a genius,” Bones says, catching Jim reading later, when he’s almost at the end.

“Ha ha,” Jim says.

“I’m just saying, I can bring you a holovid. And as your doctor, allow me to take this moment to warn you that if you keep squinting like that, before too long, kid, you’re gonna need glasses.”

Jim snorts. “Bones, when that day comes, just take me out and—“

He stops. Bones has stopped too. Jim swallows heavily.

“—Buy me some,” he finishes, lamely.

“My gift to you,” Bones says, fighting for levity, though his voice holds a heavy weight of promise.

“I look forward to it,” Jim says. “Now shut up and let me read: this Carton guy’s about to pull off some awesome last-minute save, I know it.”

*

Forget his _Surprise Spock with unexpected Dickensian wisdom_ plan; when Spock comes to visit again, he’s throwing this book straight at his dumb pointy head.

But long days pass, and Spock doesn’t come.

*

Sulu and Chekov bring a deck of cards. They use his bed as a card table, Jim’s legs a barrier, an extra level of protection to keep Chekov from sneaking a peek at Sulu’s hand. They get bored halfway through the game and nobody objects when Jim starts making up his own rules. In fact, they leap eagerly to the challenge, and before long Jim legs have been converted into a 3D game board and his helmsman and navigator are laughing and falling all over each other—until Bones, like the schoolmarm he obviously was in a previous life, reappears to shoo them out.

He regrets that they’ve already gone when Carol arrives, because she brings him flowers—a plant, really, in some sort of complicated hydroponic container; Sulu would like it. Carol spends a moment awkwardly rotating her feet in the small space, trying to decide where to put it. “Over there in the light?” he suggests. “Does it need the light?” Until, “Ah,” she says, and then they are quiet.

“How’re you doing?” he asks finally, and she ducks her head.

“Leg’s all healed up,” she says, and when she raises her face toward him again, her eyes are only slightly damp. “Good as new.”

Still she looks a little stiff as she sits. Warm California light comes in through his window, catches the purpley-white blossoms of his new plant, and shines across the golden crown of her head. “I’ve been thinking of switching specialties,” she tells him: shop talk as small talk. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Weapons systems will always hold a certain fascination for me, but I think…I started thinking, after everything…” Her hands twist in her lap: twirling through invisible wires, Jim thinks, diffusing. “Perhaps rather than working on things built to destroy,” she says, looking up at him, a spark of blue defiance, “I should like, now, to…create.”

Jim isn’t really sure what she means. He knows exactly what she means.

“The _Enterprise_ could use some thinking like that,” he says.

*

Jim’s back at the beginning again, the mysterious messenger approaching the coach, the enigmatic reply: _Jerry, say my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE._

Bones pauses in the doorway. “Jim,” he says after a moment, “you sure you know how to work those? You’re supposed to read ‘em _front_ to _back_ , not the other way around.”

Jim raises an eyebrow. “And here I thought you were a doctor, not a comedian.”

“Ugh,” Bones says with an exaggerated shudder, “don’t you start in on the eyebrow thing. When I think about the future, all I see is a horror vid of the two of you ganging up on me…”

For a moment, Jim can see it, too; and suddenly, lying there in the bed he’s breathless. Bones swings around to look at his readings with widening eyes, which fall into baffled creases when he sees Jim with his head thrown back against the pillow, heavy book rising and falling atop his belly as he helplessly laughs and laughs. 

“Bones,” Jim says, clutching at his arm, “say my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE.”

“We’re cutting back on your pain meds,” Bones says.

*

Scotty arrives with wet eyes and a bottle Bones swiftly confiscates. Once it’s gone he doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with his hands. He fusses with his cuffs, his collar, the arms of his chair; then he seems to work up some courage and claps a palm somewhere in the vicinity of Jim’s knee. Jim laughs and is still surprised at the sound—as he is surprised, at first, at how easy it is to simply listen to Scotty babble, to respond with a word or two in kind, to let it all slip away for a little while. Bones joins them for a few minutes towards the end of Scotty’s visit, and when Jim lets himself drift on their familiar voices, the strange symphony of their competing accents, it’s possible to forget that he’s stretched out on his back and they’re not. That when Scotty leaves, sure enough sure enough, he’ll be back to being hyper-aware of the press of the sheets against his skin, like all the nerves in his body are awake and crying out, _alive alive alive_.

_Shut up, nerves_ , Jim thinks. He wants Bones to give him his book back.

Later, Jim wakes and Bones is by his bedside. His face has lost the careful, practiced levity that greeted Jim when he awoke the first time. Shadows circle his eyes, grey as his worn civilian shirt—he’s no longer here as Jim’s doctor, but as his friend. His legendary hands are curled into knotty fists. “What did it feel like?” he asks in a low, rough voice, and Jim has a suspicion where Scotty’s bottle ended up. “I keep thinking—Jim, you really have gone where no man has gone before...”

In the silence that follows, Jim hears his heartbeat, the sudden, deafening pounding in his chest, drowning out anything that his gaping, fumbling lips could possibly say.

Then, “Dammit. I’m sorry, Jim,” Bones says, and he’s standing up, professional, his back straight, Chief Medical Officer Doctor Leonard McCoy. Jim’s eyes follow the crisp lines of his shoulders as he adjusts a piece of equipment; then his body seems to fade into the shadows and the shiny sterilized walls, and in the morning, the whole thing feels like a dream.

*

Jim hasn’t been dreaming, though. When he closes his eyes he falls into a blackness deeper than the far reaches of space. He feels like an old-fashioned light switch—only two settings, on or off.

_Off_ should scare him, he thinks. But it doesn’t.

*

_It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known._

They’re damn good lines, Jim thinks, reading them again, tracing the words on the page—he does like that about his big awkward book, that it’s _physical_. But as tight as his chest becomes, reading through Sydney Carton’s sacrifice—and his heart, it beats quicker, it thrums, it does; as much as sly, tragic Syd gets to him, where he really falls apart, where his eyes clouded the first time he read it and a wet spot appeared upon the page, was at the nameless seamstress who precedes Carton to the guillotine.

_You will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?_

_Yes, my poor sister; to the last._

Jim thumps the heavy book against his knee, loud in the empty room, and rolls his head on his neck to stare out the window.

*

Jim moves from darkness into light: he can feel someone in the room. A specific someone: “Spock,” he says, before he’s opened his eyes.

“Jim.” And it’s the voice, that voice, the only one that says his name like that—the warm, vibrating thread connecting his growing collection of lives: old, new, and borrowed, half-remembered. 

Jim opens his eyes into the milky dawn light. “You came,” he says.

“Not as swiftly as I should have liked.” The older Spock’s robes sweep softly along the floor. His younger counterpart spent his entire visit standing rigidly, straight-shouldered and proper, hands firmly clasped behind his back. This Spock adjusts the chair and sits without fuss. He leans forward, toward Jim, his hands steepled before him. “It is _extremely_ pleasing to see you, Jim.”

Jim tries to shrug it off. “I’m, you know, pleased to be around to be seen.”

Spock’s head is slightly bowed, almost disguising the moment his eyes flutter shut. Then they open again, both darker and brighter than his Spock’s eyes: at some point in his long long life, Jim thinks, Spock must’ve gazed too long or too fiercely into the depths of the universe and captured a little piece of it.

_See_ , he thinks a moment later, _this is what happens when you read too many books_.

Yet as he watches Spock consider his words, he feels the tension drain out of him. His sheets suddenly lie cooler; his skin no longer screams. He lets out a long breath just as Spock says, “Jim, it would be the highest form of hypocrisy for me to decry your actions, and yet I must question—”

Jim can’t even summon the appropriate level of irritation. “I did what needed to be done,” he says with a gentleness that still surprises him. “I did what— Oh.”

He’s not sure what it is: some minute movement of Spock’s face, some twinge deep inside of him, a shocking burst of pain. A flash of dizzying, disorienting déjà vu. But suddenly he knows, and his heart breaks at the knowledge of something that in the universe he inhabits never happened—and that, as long as his inhabitation continues, goddammit, never will.

“ _It is a far, far better thing…_ ” Jim mutters under his breath, but of course he’s contending with Vulcans and their damn super-hearing.

“What did you say?” asks Spock.

“Oh,” says Jim. “Nothing. Just, I’ve been holed up in here, and you—other you—gave me this book.”

He pulls it out from under his pillow and hands it to Spock. Long, tapered fingers run over the worn brown covers, trace the embossed letters of the spine. Spock’s head twitches slightly to the side. That voice emerges, soft. “Fascinating.”

Jim shrugs. “I’m not much of a reader.” Those glittering eyes lift and catch him out. “I mean, I haven’t been.” He pauses, futilely, before giving in to the honesty that this version of his first officer always seems to provoke. “I read it three times in a row.”

“Then I have been remiss,” says Spock in a stronger tone, handing the book back. “I should have brought you something to supplement your library.”

Jim lets himself grin. “You can owe me.”

“I shall endeavor to make good on my debt,” says Spock solemnly, a hint of a tease hidden beneath all that Vulcan formality. Jim feels warm. Spock is here: he needs to focus on that, and not the weight of what he’s just learned. Spock is here, and whatever his own other, heedless self allowed to happen to him in Jim’s place is a thing of the past, an aspect of an aborted future.

“Bones wanted to know what it felt like,” Jim blurts suddenly, and he knows how he looks in Spock’s eyes: so human. Always so human.

Spock’s lips thin as he slowly nods. “He asked me much the same question.”

“And what did you tell him?” Jim asks with a hard swallow.

That eyebrow lifts, still thin and dark and dignified. “I informed the good doctor that it would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference.”

Jim huffs out a laugh. “I’ll bet he loved that.”

“He did indeed exhibit the usual symptoms of frustration.”

“Then it was all worth it,” Jim says with something like a smile.

“Yes,” says Spock, imbuing the word with all its meaning, large and encompassing. “However, I am finding it to be a rather different experience from the other side.”

“Then you’ll just have to trust our common frame of reference,” Jim says, slowly, “when I tell you that I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“I know, Jim,” Spock says, then makes a strange, abortive gesture. Like he’s reaching for Jim’s hand—and Jim can’t just let that go, the desire for contact at once fierce within him. He catches the edge of Spock’s fingers with his own, a collision that immediately turns gentle. Jim feels a great tenderness welling up within him, and he’s doing nothing more than run the edge of his index finger up over the pads of Spock’s—rising pinkie to ring to middle, then down.

He hears Spock’s breath catch. “Jim,” he says roughly, a valiant but ultimately poor attempt at dissuasion. “Jim, I am not sure you understand…”

“I do,” Jim says, turning Spock’s hand in his, shivery fingertips, forefinger to forefinger. “I do, though.” A smile breaks out across his face. “Common frame of reference, remember?”

“Always,” Spock says, eyelashes fluttering as he fights for control. Jim is learning to read him like a book, and he’s going to, again and again and again— 

“But you must recall,” says Spock, sounding steadier, “that we two are not the only ones who share it.”

Then with one last caress, his hand withdraws. 

And all at once, Jim realizes: they are not alone in the room.

Spock stands stiffly in the doorway. His hands are braced behind his back, further obscured by the even larger book he’s carrying between them. “Doctor McCoy expressed a concern that you lacked sufficient stimulus,” Spock says. The warmth that infused his voice at their last meeting is entirely gone. “Yet it appears that you are not, in fact, lacking in stimulation.”

Jim manages to contain his laugh, if not his blush. He feels like a teenager, caught out. He exchanges a glance with the older Spock and wonders how much stranger the experience must be for him.

Spock, however, handles it with grace. “Ahh, Mister Spock,” he says, rising. “I was merely keeping Jim company until your arrival.”

The younger Spock’s eyes shift across his counterpart, brown and very, very cool. He looks decidedly unimpressed when Spock offers him his chair.

“Please, sit.”

“I believe it is more _appropriate_ to stand.”

The faintest quirk of the older Spock’s lips: Jim can see it, reading between the lines. “Trust an old man. You will be far more comfortable if you sit.”

The younger Spock doesn’t move. The older moves softly past him. “We will speak again, Jim,” he says. “There is much for us to discuss.”

“Count on it,” Jim says. Only after Spock has left does he realize he’s clutching his still-tingling hand, like some delicate flower, to his chest.

He’s about to tuck it away when he sees Spock see it. “You didn’t come back so I had to find some other way to occupy myself,” he says, leaving the fingers curled in plain sight. 

“There were other matters, including the inquiries of Starfleet and the repair of our ship, that required my attention, and both Doctor McCoy and Lieutenant Uhura had assured me that—”

“Relax!” Jim says hurriedly, reaching out a stilling hand, forgetting his little game. “I was just teasing. If we can’t still tease each other, Spock, I don’t think we’ll be able to exchange more than two sentences at a time.”

“I am not sure I understand your implication—”

Jim gives him a look. Spock’s shoulders relax minutely.

He steps forward, avoiding the empty chair, holding out his ginormous book like an offering. “Knowing you have proved insufficiently capable of occupying yourself, it appears prudent that I chose to bring you further reading material. Although—” and up quirks that eyebrow. Jim smiles to himself as he relieves Spock of his gift. “Perhaps I would have shown more prudence in bringing you a volume on the significance of Vulcan customs.”

“I have done a _little_ reading,” Jim says, shifting the book around in his hands. _The Complete Works of William Shakespeare_. He spends a second wondering if these gifts mean Spock thinks he’s a total philistine—but then he remembers the other Spock’s fingers on the other worn spine, and decides that in fact it might be the opposite: that Spock is one of the first people to consider that he may not be, that he could be more than his reputation suggests. That he’s outlived it.

The cover is a warm green cloth. Jim smooths his hand over it. _“Good pilgrim_ ,” he murmurs, strangely unselfconscious—though if he met Spock’s gaze, it might be another matter. “ _You do wrong your hand too much,/Which mannerly devotion shows in this;/For saints have hands that sinners hands do touch,/And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss_.”

“So you are familiar,” Spock says, after a measured pause. Jim steals a glance up and sees he’s standing with his hand on the back of the chair. 

“I must be,” Jim says, with a growing sense of lightness. “But I’m looking forward to familiarizing myself again.”

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of lines adapted from _The Voyage Home_. Also quotes from _A Tale of Two Cities_ , _Moby-Dick_ , _Romeo and Juliet_ , and _Valley of the Dolls_ ("the giants"!).


End file.
